13 TechCrunch stories you don’t want to miss this week

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This week we went hands-on with a few awesome gadgets (including the Fitbit Blaze and the Meta 2 AR headset), Slack introduced voice calling and one of Google’s self-driving cars got into a minor accident. These are the stories to catch you up this week.

1. We went hands on with Meta 2, a $949 augmented reality headset with a near 90-degree field-of-view.

5. Sarah Buhr reviewed the $199 Fitbit Blaze fitness tracker. It has a built-in heart monitor and sleep-tracking capability and allows you to leave your phone behind for a nice walk or jog. But its clunky design is something people may not be able to get past.

11. Google rolled out a pilot program that introduces a new way to pay cashiers — and it involves leaving your phone in your pocket. It’s called Hands Free, and it’s a way to basically connect your phone with a point-of-sale system using the sensors on your phone.

12. Contributor Gene Hoffman reminisces about the time Netflix was initially written off by the major Hollywood players as a dumping ground for content that nobody cared about — and just how far it has come — in “Netflix: The Force Awakens.”

13. In After the Gold Rush, Jon Evans argues that the startup gold rush of the last 10 years is over.